By goyox86
on Thursday, July 6, 2017

This is the 24th post of a series of blog posts tracking the development and progress of Redox, the Rust operating system. If you want to know more about Redox in general, visit our Github page.

(edited by goyox86)

PSA

If you have any questions, ideas, or are curious about Redox, we recommend joining #redox on irc.mozilla.org or our Discourse forum!

TL;DR

Welcome to another edition of “This Week in Redox”! Without further preamble let’s dive in!

Starting with the kernel land @jackpot51 started work on signals as this is needed for one of cargo’s dependencies. Also @ids1024 Implemented the getppid system call. There was not much activity on the drivers side of things, only a fix for seek flags handling on the Intel HDA audio driver by @xTibor.

The folks of Ion specially @huntergoldstein have been on fire! Shipping a ton of stuff: adding sub-expressions, convenience methods @graphemes(..), @bytes(..) and @chars(..) supporting different ways of iterating strings. Also, the addition of a really nice match-case construct to the grammar. @mmstick along with @myfreeweb have been working on Ion’s job control facility on things like adding support for process groups, handling of SIGTERM and SIGTSTP and the addition of bg, wait and jobs builtin commands.

On TFS@ticki reenabled jemalloc as it was not the cause of this bug. Something worth to mention is that we are currently having a sneaky segfault in one of the conc::sync::treiber tests, maybe you reading this have the fix and we don’t now it!? ;) Jump in!

What about coreutils? Well, the uptime and readlink commands were added as well as a bunch of fixes and improvements for stat. netutils’s httpd was switched to the Hyper crate and the cookbook has seen the birth of a Python language recipe by @ids1024. In pkgutils the pkg continues to evolve steadily. Where you wondering what @jackpot51 has been doing? The answer is: starting the work on UEFI support! You can take a look here and here. Rust libstd support for UEFI? Yes that too! (WIP though). And last but not least @ids1024 continues his work on GSoC trying to make Redox self-hosting! Notably his work on adding symlinks support to redoxfs.

Ion

Ion is a shell for UNIX platforms, and is the default shell in Redox. It is still a work in progress, but much of the core functionality is complete. It is also currently significantly faster than Bash, and even Dash, making it the fastest system shell to date.